Customer Reviews

The Book on Fire

5 star:		(10)
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2 star:		(2)
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Keith Miller's second novel is even more erudite, sensible & shocking than his first (The Book of Flying). At first glance, The Book on Fire is a story of impossible, incendiary loves set in a mythologised Alexandria. But the reader slowly catches on with the author's devious deceptions, realizing that woven between the lines of the sumptuous story is a treatise on the inalienable freedom of words.

Miller is a perfect showman: the whole is breath-taking, filthy & sublime; his characters are bibliophiles & whores, blaspheming priests & addicts. The plot twists & turns & coils upon itself; the prose gently cajoles before snapping at you with expletives & scatology.

The Book on Fire is not for the casual reader or the tourist: it is the antithesis of our insipid, white anglo-saxon sheepishness, confusing cultures, creeds & morals in a world which reveals to us our own madness.

The Book on Fire builds a world where reading is as consuming as a drug addiction, as delicious as the perfect mango, as breath-taking as a beautiful girl with words in her eyes. If books and reading have ever been your escape, your lover, your lifeboat, your treasure, this book will speak to your heart.

Might this be the perfect story? I don't mean to exaggerate. All we have is a chapter. But reading this it seems amazing that we had to wait so long for a novel about love (of books and women, of women who are half-book) set in history's greatest library before its fall. What have we been waiting for? This opening chapter is nothing less than a brilliant seduction by a thief, a city, and a library. So think of 'A Gentle Madness,' Nicholas Basbanes' great book on book-stealing. But then combine that with the Song of Solomon or Plato's Symposium, texts in which literature is inseparable from the erotic. Finally add some remarkable prose. What you get is a true reader's book. We follow Balthazar through these first pages and at the end are not sure if we are more eager to learn more about the veiled Zeinab or the windowless library of Alexandria. I can't wait to read more.

-- this book and Keith Miller's other book, The Book of Flying, are the most magnificent books I've ever read. Nobody else has ever written so eloquently about what it means to love books, words, and stories, and in such a magical and brilliant story.

Reading a truly great book causes a beautifully tragic sensation because as you delight in each new line of text and turn of plot, there's also the stark and stinging reality that you've just consumed a beautiful moment that never again will be. Before you began, before you cracked the spine and turned the first page, the book was all mystery and potential. But after hours alone, having greedily devoured the text and the images and magic that they produced, you put down a spent book. The book that was afire with life is now in some ways consumed. You can read and reread--and you will if it's truly great--and you can carefully pass it along to other kindred souls, and then delight in seeing the flash and flush that reminds you of your first time, but you're still left hungry for more. For more first times.

Keith Miller's story is bizarrely and lushly written, exuding the feel of a just-awakened-from dream that is simultaneously deeply familiar and fantastically foreign. Or, perhaps more exactly, it both creates and provides an analogy for that warmly disoriented feeling you have when you emerge from an engrossing story, unsure of which is more real, the images and characters still parading around in your mind or the concrete reality of the book, the chair, and the coffee cup that surround you. In this story, Balthazar's obsession about his own treasured books is equaled only by his compulsion to find and consume the next great text--an easy analogy for this reader to relate to. And though this tid-bit only hints at what's to come, it seems from Miller's description that the love of books and the love of a lover become intertwined as the story progresses, forcing Balthazar to destroy what he loves because he loves it, thus acting out the feeling of reading great books--the consumption of something one loves because one loves it.

I look forward to the opportunity of reading more of this story, knowing already that once it's done, though I'll hoard it away in my secret stash, I, like Balthazar, will be left hungering for more.

"Do you love to read?" Mr. Miller asks the reader. Do you? Often metafiction ends up being too clever for its own good. Hell, most fiction today ends up being too clever for its own good. Or, even worse, you have to wade through rivers filled with post-modern ironic winks. Enough! Again, Mr. Miller asked us, "Do you love to read?" I do. You know, I do.

I picture Charles Bukowski finding this book in the library and stealing it. I see him now hidden under the shadows of a bridge reading it alone with a flashlight and a bottle of cheap wine. Why? I think he preferred reading to living. Keith Miller writes like he does too.

As I read this tease of a tease of Keith Miller's "The Book of Fire" I recall the opening lines of "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler" by Italo Calvino:

"Well, what are you waiting for? Stretch your legs, go ahead and put your feet on a cushion, or two cushions, on the arms of the sofa, on the wings of the chair, on the coffee table, on the desk, on the piano, on the globe. Take your shoes off first. If you want to, put your feet up; if not, put them back. Now don't stand there with your shoes in one hand and the book in the other.

Adjust the light so you won't strain your eyes. Do it now, because once you're absorbed in reading there will be no budging you. Make sure the page isn't in shadow, a clotting of black letters on a gray background, uniform as a pack of mice; but be careful that the light cast on it isn't too strong, doesn't glare on the cruel white of the paper gnawing at the shadows of the letters as in a southern noonday. Try to foresee now everything that might make you interrupt your reading. Cigarettes within reach, if you smoke, and the ashtray. Anything else? Do you have to pee? All right, you know best."

Well, do you know best? I do. So, my lamp and chair and wines and pipe and pistachios and dried apricots are at the ready for the publication of "The Book of Fire."

Charles Monroe-Kane
Producer for public radio's "To the Best of Our Knowledge"

After alighting on the shores of Miller's Alexandria, meeting the sensual and bizarre characters tucked away among the city streets, and exploring the world's most perfect library, a monumental effort is needed to drag oneself away from this tome. Not unlike Balthazar and his lover descending into the books they hold more dear than anything, the reader wallows in the author's exquisite prose, captivated by the rich dreamworld of Alexandria, a delicious amalgamation of past and present, real and surreal. The Book on Fire is not simply a celebration of reading... it is new literary voice that explores the extremes of love and desire and fantasy. Get it, read it, don't burn it...

Bold, bizarre and lyrical, this excerpt pulls the reader into a city bursting with its own rich character. Like Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, The Book on Fire presents us with a city as essential to the novel as any of its inhabitants. The city, part fantasy and part reality, is alive, and the descriptions of it sensual and vivid. Its sights, sounds and smells are so fully imagined that the reader easily accepts its elements of pure fantasy. It's all about the writing: this book is itself on fire with Miller's dazzling prose. I savored the excerpt-- it's writing that deserves, indeed demands, to be read slowly-- and remain hungry for more.

Hey there's some serious talent in this competition after all. Do yourself a favor and read this excerpt. Find yourself captivated by Balthazar the book thief and this well-imagined, fantasy Alexandria.

This one is literary in the best meaning of the term. Rich imagery, a Shakespearean vocabulary, superb control of the prose.

The story moves along just fine and offers sufficient intrigue. The sole criticism I can make of this excerpt is the prose is a tad over-written here and there--usually an adjective that doesn't make any sense.

Full disclosure: I'm a semi-finalist in Amazon's competition too.

A truly unique voice - urbane, informed, energetic. I thought of Laurence Durrell because of Alexandria and the lush and lovely language. This is a readers read (see excerpts below), candy for those who love literature and language. If this voice and level of language is merged with an engaging plot, this book will be a rewarding read.
I love to read and loved this:

"But if you have truly read a good book, a book more lovely than dying, more quenching than the act of love, then you might discover on these shelves a title that chimes with some long-interred emotion."

"Do you love to read? I'm talking about nestling in a pool of lamplight and cradling a book like a baby in your lap and nudging the corner upward with your thumb, the whorls snagging the grain of the paper, and hearing the soft sizzle as the page turns. Do you love to read?"

Yes, yes, yes for The Book of Fire